RightNow – On Demand CRM Software

Invitrogen Taps RightNow To Enhance Relationships With Scientific Community

Goals

• Resolve highly technical inquiries from scientific community
• Work with internal dependencies to solve customer issues
• Avoid the "institutional knowledge trap"

Achievements

• Enhanced corporate positioning as “your strategic partner”
• Tune Up boosts knowledge base effectiveness rate to 93 percent while call volume dropped 15 percent
• Leveraged knowledge base for training; avoided information silos
• Accelerated business cycles based on hard data 30 percent survey response rate yields 93 percent of customers indicating a high degree of satisfaction

As it turns out, even science itself is not a perfect science. Biotech researchers—pioneers at the forefront of gene research, cloning and the development of drugs and vaccines for cancer, AIDs and many other diseases—work in a complex and often inexact world. Before even beginning an experiment, scientists must understand how to use the newest technologies and research equipment to gather data or the results could be misconstrued. Biotech scientists are undertaking research that has never been done before, so analyzing the processes and methods of their experiments is as important as the results themselves. And they rely in part on the makers of their research tools for information that may be vital to the success of their work.

That's why Carlsbad, California-based Invitrogen (NASDAQ: IVGN), a manufacturer of products to accelerate biological discovery and understanding so scientists can accomplish experiments faster, easier, and more reliably, sees its products and services as inseparable. A preeminent leader in its field, Invitrogen has developed its positioning based in part on customer service as a differentiator. With customers that include some of the nation's leading research institutions, such as the University of California, Abbott Laboratories and the National Institutes of Health, Invitrogen relies on its technical support operation to offer credible, timely information on its complex products.

"Our messaging to the scientific community is that you get not only our products, you get our service," said Kira Sevene, workflow coordinator for Invitrogen technical service.

Invitrogen's technical support staff could be mistaken for a research department at Johns Hopkins or Stanford University—almost all of the 43 technical service representatives have PhDs in the Life Sciences. To accurately field the highly complex nature of the scientific inquiries it receives, Invitrogen trains each agent on its own products for four months before they have any customer interaction. The company's technical service group comprises five teams with specific product or research area expertise.

In the same spirit of strategic partnership, Invitrogen relies on RightNow's on demand CRM solution to deliver quality support and streamline business processes for highly complex customer inquiries. In addition to offloading administrative burdens through RightNow's hosted delivery system, Invitrogen reaped increased self-service rates from incorporating some of the "best practices" suggested by RightNow.

Following a free Tune Up from RightNow's professional services organization, Invitrogen made some simple changes to its website that contributed to a 32 percent increase in customers viewing answers, from just over 73,000 to 109,310 in a single calendar year. Sample answers include "How to I decontaminate my tissue culture?" and "How can I treat my RNA sample to eliminate DNA contamination?"

Simple changes to the site made a big difference: Invitrogen adopted RightNow's suggestion to shorten the questions so that more could be viewed on a screen, which increased from a few questions viewable at one time to nine. Also, the option to send in an email was moved from the first screen to the second—it's an extra click away and has encouraged site visitors to view answers before moving ahead, a fact that has contributed to its increased self-service rates. RightNow also suggested that the first page in technical support be the answers. These improvements boosted Invitrogen's knowledge base effectiveness from 86 percent to 93 percent in only ten months following the Tune Up. Meanwhile, call volume dropped 15 percent that same period, due in part to more customers' self-serving and/or getting timely response to their emails.

A key value of the RightNow on demand CRM solution is the knowledge base, which is used as an internal training tool as well as for customer service, noted Sevene. Having all answers stored in an easily searchable place, and being able to sort by product or type of question, has helped Invitrogen avoid the common trap of institutional knowledge, where individuals become such knowledge experts that problems cannot be solved if they are unavailable. With literally thousands of products, not even an experienced service representative with a PhD can know everything, so it has been vital to have good reports for leveraging prior service encounters and to have workflow-enabled routing to the best possible expert.

RightNow/Siebel Integration: The Multi-channel Contact Center

In addition to greatly enhancing their web and email communications channels, Invitrogen also wanted to take advantage of RightNow's integration capabilities to unify those channels with its telephone support. Following an upgrade to Siebel 7.5, Invitrogen will work with RightNow's professional services team to have incidents in RightNow automatically populate in Siebel. By doing so, Invitrogen will treat all the customer's inquiries in a single communications thread, regardless of whether they came in by phone, fax or email'thus speeding problem resolution. This integration will streamline the workflow for technical service personnel who handle both phone calls and emails.

"Currently we have to cut and paste emails from RightNow into Siebel. After we integrate the two, incidents in RightNow will automatically populate in Siebel. We're really looking forward to that; it will be a huge time savings," said Sevene.

RightNow's analytics feature has been critical in staffing for peak demands. Being able to track peak days of the week, even peak hours of the day, ensures Invitrogen has more experts on hand when they need it, which is key to maintaining acceptable resolution times.

"In addition to being tier one for North America, we are tier two support for worldwide, so our peak loads are mornings, when we come in to all the overnight requests plus the ones for the new day," said Sevene. The complex nature of scientist's inquiries means that Invitrogen's staff frequently consult with other scientists, namely in their research and development operation (R&D), to ensure an accurate response. This internal dependency for incident response means some inquiries take days to resolve. But with RightNow's reporting capabilities, they are able to provide reports to R&D documenting response times for these inquiries.

"It's been very helpful to show our internal colleagues that at times it's taken as much as two weeks for us to get all the data we need from them to fulfill a customer request," said Sevene. "This kind of data has helped us get our initial response rate down to under eight hours. Now we get back to customers within a day."

The results include increased customer satisfaction. With RightNow, every customer receives a satisfaction survey, and in one calendar year, Invitrogen saw a 30 percent response rate with 93 percent of customers indicating a high degree of satisfaction.

Managing technical inquiries on thousands of products would be completely unmanageable without RightNow, noted Sevene. RightNow's analytic capabilities are imperative to tracking customer and product information, which is the foundation of the great service that differentiates this company. Having scientists talk to scientists is one way Invitrogen forges close relationships with customers, offering the kind of service that embeds its products into streams of research that are changing the world.

Invitrogen Corporation Support Site | Invitrogen Corporation Homepage

About Invitrogen Corporation

Founded in 1987, Invitrogen (NASDAQ: IVGN) provides research equipment and services for research in the life sciences industry. Its research and development efforts focus on breakthrough innovations in biological discovery, including functional genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, and cell biology. With 2003 revenues of more than $770 million, Invitrogen employs roughly 4,000 research professionals worldwide.